Some U.S. firms paid more to CEOs and on lobbying than taxes.

..WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a pay study said on Wednesday.

It also found many of the companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.

At a time when lawmakers are facing tough choices in a quest to slash the national debt, the report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning Washington think tank, quickly hit a nerve.

After reading it, Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called for hearings on executive compensation.

In a letter to that committee's chairman, Republican Darrell Issa, Cummings asked "to examine the extent to which the problems in CEO compensation that led to the economic crisis continue to exist today."

He also asked "why CEO pay and corporate profits are skyrocketing while worker pay stagnates and unemployment remains unacceptably high," and "the extent to which our tax code may be encouraging these growing disparities."

In putting together its study, IPS chose to compare CEO pay to current U.S. taxes paid, excluding foreign and state and local taxes that may have been paid, as well as deferred taxes which can often be far larger than current taxes paid.

The group's rationale was that deferred taxes may or may not be paid, and that current U.S. taxes paid are the closest approximation in public documents to what companies may have actually written a check for last year.

$16.7 MILLION AVERAGE

Compensation for the 25 CEOs with pay surpassing corporate taxes averaged $16.7 million, according to the study, compared to a $10.8 million average for S&P 500 CEOs. Among the companies topping the IPS list:

* eBay whose CEO John Donahoe made $12.4 million, but which reported a $131 million refund on its 2010 current U.S. taxes.

* Boeing, which paid CEO Jim McNerney $13.8 million, sent in $13 million in federal income taxes, and spent $20.8 million on lobbying and campaign spending

* General Electric where CEO Jeff Immelt earned $15.2 million in 2010, while the company got a $3.3 billion federal refund and invested $41.8 million in its own lobbying and political campaigns.

Though the companies come from different industries, their tax breaks fall into two primary areas.

Two-thirds of the firms studied kept their taxes low by utilizing offshore subsidiaries in tax havens such as Bermuda, Singapore and Luxembourg. The remaining companies benefited from accelerated depreciation.

Shareholders have responded favorably when companies in which they invest keep a tax bill low through legal methods, thereby benefiting earnings. But Chuck Collins, an IPS senior scholar and co-author of the report, said that is a mistake.

"I think it's an exposure of weakness in a company if their profitability is dependent on their accounting department and not on making better widgets," he said.

In prior reports, Collins said, out-sized CEO pay was often a red flag of bigger problems to come. The IPS has been putting a pay report together for 18 years. Among those whose leaders have made the high pay list in years past, only to have their businesses falter: Tyco, Enron and WorldCom.

(Reporting by Nanette Byrnes; Editing by Howard Goller and Todd Eastham)

(The following story was corrected to show Boeing paid CEO Jim McNerney $13.8 million, not billion)

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating Standard & Poors (S&P) over mortgages

The Attorney General of the United States,

Eric Holder

..(Reuters) - The Justice Department is investigating whether Standard & Poor's improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years before the financial crisis, The New York Times reported on Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The investigation began before S&P, a unit of McGraw-Hill, downgraded the long-term U.S. debt from a AAA rating to AA-plus this month, the paper said.

In the mortgage investigation, the Justice Department has been asking about instances in which S&P analysts wanted to assign lower ratings to mortgage bonds but may have been overruled by S&P business managers, the Times reported.

Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the story upon being contacted by Reuters. S&P did not immediately respond to phone calls seeking comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

It was unclear whether the Justice Department investigation also involves the other two ratings agencies, Moody's Corp and Fimalac SA's Fitch, or only S&P, the newspaper said.

The paper quoted Ed Sweeney, a spokesman for S&P, in an e-mail that the agency had received several requests from different government agencies over the last few years and that it was cooperating with these requests.

The Times said that despite the outcry over the ratings agencies' failures in the financial crisis, investors still rely heavily on ratings from the three main agencies for their purchases of sovereign and corporate debt, as well as other complex financial products.

Companies and some countries, though not the United States, pay the agencies to receive a rating. For decades, the government issued rules that banks, mutual funds and others could rely on a AAA stamp of approval for investing decisions -- which bolstered the agencies' power, the newspaper said.

A successful case or settlement against a giant like S&P could accelerate the shift away from the traditional ratings system, the Times said.

For instance, the Dodd-Frank financial reform overhaul sought to decrease the emphasis on ratings, but bank regulators have been slow to spell out how the reform would work.

S&P has been under fire from lawmakers, market players and the U.S. Treasury Department since its decision to cut the U.S. credit rating.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was also reviewing whether S&P followed all of its policies leading up to the credit downgrade, according to sources familiar with the review.

Key committees in Congress may also hold hearings about the downgrade and reforms of the ratings industry.

(Reporting by Soham Chatterjee in Bangalore and JoAnne Allen in Washington; Editing by Philip Barbara and Ramya Venugopal)

....@yahoonews on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook ..

Government dollars fuel wealth: D.C. enclaves reap rewards of contracting boom

These are the people the GOP refuses to tax

By Annie Gowen, Published: August 15

Millions of dollars worth of federal contracts transformed Anita Talwar from a government accounting clerk into a wealthy woman — one who can afford a $2.8 million home in the Washington suburbs with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers.

Talwar, a 59-year-old immigrant from India, had no idea that she and her husband would amass a small fortune when she launched a company providing tech support to the federal government in 1987. But she shrewdly took advantage of programs for minority-owned small businesses and rode a boom in federal contracting.

By the time Talwar sold Advanced Management Technology in 2004, it had grown from a one-woman shop to a company with more than 350 employees and $100 million in annual revenue — all of it from government contracts.

Talwar’s success — and that of hundreds of other contractors like her — is a key factor driving the explosion of the Washington region’s wealth over the last two decades. It also has exacerbated the gap between high- and low-wage workers, which is wider in the D.C. area than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country, and five of the top 10 jurisdictions in America — Loudoun, Howard and Fairfax counties, and Falls Church and Fairfax City — are here, census data shows.

The signs of that wealth are on display all over, from the string of luxury boutiques such as Gucci and Tory Burch opening at Tysons Galleria to the $15 cocktails served over artisanal ice at the W Hotel in the District to the ever-larger houses rising off River Road in Potomac.

But nowhere is the region’s wealth more concentrated than the place where Talwar purchased her 15,000-square-foot white-brick estate home: Great Falls, a once-rural enclave of about 15,000 residents 17 miles west of the White House.

Sixteen percent of Great Falls households earn $500,000 or above a year, and more than half make at least $250,000, according to Nielsen Claritas. By comparison, 11 percent of households in Potomac earn $500,000 or more, and McLean and Bethesda each boast 10 percent at that level.

 

Talwar’s neighbors are entrepreneurs, lobbyists, CEOs, tech moguls, financiers and defense contractors for whom two wars have been very, very good business. Their portfolios take hits when the stock market plummets, as it did this month, but the setbacks are usually temporary.

While others have struggled to recover from the recession, many of the residents of Great Falls have continued to launch new business ventures, enjoy easy access to venture capital and reap the benefits of bonuses and deferred compensation plans. Median household income there has increased 32 percent in the last 10 years, helping to widen the divide between those at the top and bottom of the economic ladder to a record high in Virginia.

Like their counterparts in California’s Silicon Valley or Seattle, Great Falls residents tend to be low-key about their wealth, more partial to sweatshirts than designer duds. In their jobs they wield enormous power, but it isn’t always obvious at first glance.

Look closely, however, and the patina of affluence is everywhere.

A white Mercedes sits next to a black Jaguar in the student parking lot at the local public high school, Langley High. At the community Easter egg roll, children grab eggs filled with chocolate and tiny gemstones like blue topaz and citrine.

The guest speaker for the new Rotary Club’s first meeting in June? Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

A surge in contracting

Forty years ago, few people thought of Washington as a place to get rich. It was a staid town where a third of the residents earned modest but steady paychecks working for the federal government.

The new Washington is a global business hub with thriving technology, biotech and communications industries. Only 12 percent of workers are federal employees. But the federal government remains an engine of job creation, outsourcing its tech support and other services to contracting firms ringing the Capital Beltway, a phenomenon that exploded in the years after 9/11.

More than $80 billion in federal contracting dollars will flow to the region this year, up from $4.2 billion in 1980, according to Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a seven-fold increase. A third of the region’s gross regional product now comes from federal spending.

But that tide is likely to slow because of a $1 trillion debt-reduction package approved earlier this month by Congress and President Obama. In the coming months, a bipartisan“supercommittee” will be searching for another $1.5 trillion in savings. Defense contractors are already bracing themselves for deep cuts in military spending.

Federal cash has been “the major catalyst for economic growth in the last 30 years,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), former chairman of the board of supervisors in Fairfax County, where companies garner more federal contracting dollars than anywhere else in the country. “Clearly that [federal] presence and that pattern of investment has transformed the economy.”

 

The CEOs of big defense contractors here received compensation packages that rival those on Wall Street: Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of Lockheed Martin, received $19 million last year, while General Dynamics CEO Jay L. Johnson made $13 million, according to a recent survey conducted for The Washington Post by the research firm Equilar. The CEOs of smaller outfits also do well. Richard Montoni, the CEO of Maximus, pulls in $3 million.

Even rank-and-file employees benefit. In a recent survey by the jobs Web site ClearanceJobs.com, contractors with security clearances earned an average salary of $98,221, or 18 percent more than those doing similar jobs in the government.

The concentration of wealth in Washington has helped fuel public resentment of the federal government. “I think it reinforces the cultural disconnect that exists between Washington and the rest of the country,” said James Galbraith, a government professor at the University of Texas and director of its Inequality Project. “Do you have a community of insiders that has a hammerlock on their share of the public resources? I think the answer is yes.”

Meanwhile, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown dramatically wider, said Michael Cassidy, president of the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis in Richmond.

High-wage workers in the District and Virginia make more than five times as much as their low-wage counterparts, the second- and third-highest such ratios in the country, a recent study by the institute showed. Only New Jersey had a greater gulf. Maryland ranked seventh.

Much of this inequity is driven by the fact that the region’s workforce is the best educated in the country, economists say. Many of the jobs both in and out of government require advanced or specialized degrees, which generally fetch hefty salaries.

Those in Virginia with college degrees saw their wages rise 5 percent during the recession, while those without saw steep declines, the study showed.

 

In Great Falls, Kimberley Sisco, 43, personifies the gap. She is just 18 credits shy of a degree in communications, law, economics and government from American University, but she works as a bartender.

She and her husband, who rent a stone cottage, are barely scraping by. “I’ve rolled quarters to pay the rent,” Sisco said. “I don’t go out to eat. I don’t take vacations. I haven’t shopped for new clothes, other than for my son, in seven years.”

Sisco used to consider herself solidly middle class. But when the economy tanked, her job as a graphic designer was outsourced to Indonesia, and her husband was unable find work as a handyman. Together, they brought in about $35,000 annually in the past two years.

She is keenly aware of the divide between herself and her neighbors. She built a backyard playground — with a tree house, slide and trampoline — entirely with neighbors’ gifts and castoffs. She sews blankets for abandoned fawns at the Wildlife Rescue League from donated mink coats.

When she e-mailed the local baseball league to ask if she could pay her son’s registration fee in installments, they waived it. She sent another e-mail and ended up with donated cleats and other practice gear.

 

She wonders if it would help her family’s future to finish her degree.

“I think about it all the time,” she said. “Can I do an independent study or get grants to help me with the cost? If you want to know the truth, I’m so tired most of the time, it’s enough just to get through each week right now.”

A transformation

In some ways, the wooded hills and rustic barns of Great Falls still hark back to the days when George Washington rode to the hounds nearby.

“When I moved out here, my parents thought I’d gone to the ends of the Earth,” said Wayne Foley, who has lived in Great Falls for more than three decades and runs a business that builds custom homes.

Back then, you could still buy a small house for less than $100,000. Now, the average home price is $1 million.

Foley has seen the place change from a community of farmers and horse-lovers into a haven for the wealthy, who have been tearing down old stone cottages and putting up increasingly large homes.

The first wave of money came in the ’90s, when AOL millionaires and other workers from the burgeoning tech corridor around Dulles began moving in. These days, many of Foley’s clients are defense contractors. He is doing one million-dollar remodeling project that includes an observatory, pistol range and audio-visual room.

It would be unfair to say that the recession had no impact here. Sixty-three homes went into foreclosure in the last four years, according to Hanley Wood Market Intelligence, a real estate research firm.

But longtime residents fear the area is becoming an insulated bubble where those who trim the shrubbery and pour the lattes at the coffee shop can’t afford to live. The number of children at Great Falls Elementary School eligible for free and reduced lunches — one measure of poverty — is less than 1 percent, compared to nearly a quarter of all Fairfax County schoolchildren.

“Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to find someone to clean your house or a painter or a plumber, they were all local people,” said Karen Washburn, a local historian and real estate agent.

Now, on Saturday mornings, the parking lot in front of the Old Brogue Irish Pub is filled with luxury car aficionados at “Cars and Coffee,” a weekly event founded by local resident Bob Morris, who runs a string of successful golf courses.

Peter Garahan, who owns a Ferrari, a Bentley and an original Mini Cooper, said it’s a great place to schmooze and swap names of venture capitalists, references for potential employees and industry insights.

“It’s high-level networking,” said Garahan, 64, a tech entrepreneur. “It’s the glue that holds this community together.” And also helps perpetuate its wealth.

 

One recent day, Garahan stopped at the local sushi place to admire a blue Ford GTX convertible, one of only 30 such cars ever made, and ended up meeting its owner, Ian Landy. Landy, 47, is a swashbuckling Brit who races antique cars for fun and runs an experiential gift company called Excitations.

In an “only in Great Falls” type of moment, the two got to talking, and realized — surprise! — that they had both sold tech companies to Cisco in the late 1990s for more than $100 million.

Now the two are considering teaming up on a business deal.

A different economy

Anita Talwar was just 22 when she immigrated to the United States from New Delhi. Her first job was as an accounting clerk for the Army. She hadn’t been in the country long before she began thinking about striking out on her own.

Advanced Management Technology’s first big break came in 1992, when it secured a $3 million, three-year contract to provide help-desk support to the Federal Aviation Administration. Soon her firm was providing tech support services to a host of agencies, including the FAA, the Transportation Department and NASA. She eventually sold the company to an Arlington aviation consulting firm for an undisclosed sum.

Last year, with her two sons grown, Talwar and her husband, Madan, moved from Fairfax Station to their sprawling home in Great Falls. They were drawn by the country ambience and friends who lived nearby.

When asked if her neighbors had felt the impact of the recession, she smiled quietly and said she didn’t think so.

“I think the economy is very different in Washington, D.C., than in the rest of the country because of the federal dollars,” she said. “Directly or indirectly, we all work for the federal government.”

 

Staff researcher Magda Jean-Louis and research

This was sent to me by a highly respected friend who is quite serious about this mission.  Thanks Roberta!



This is bipartisan in nature and is going to both Democrats and Republicans (et. al.). We should all seriously consider helping with the change suggested below. This is something I will fight for, and I hope you will, too. This is short; so please read it all the way through and then forward.You will be glad you did.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around..

CONGRESSIONAL REFORM ACT OF 2011

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) must participate in Social Security and pay Social Security taxes. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund will move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system and Congress participates with the American people. These funds may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress must purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves pay raises. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress will terminate their current health care system and participate in the same health care systems as the American people.

6. Congress must equally, without exception, abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make these contracts with Congressmen. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

For Johnny, Tommy & Seth ...

With their futures robbed, youths are erupting in anger

By Courtland Milloy, Tuesday, August 09,10:39 PM

From D.C. to London, Philadelphia to Liverpool, Milwaukee to Bristol, law-abiding citizens say they just can’t figure out what’s up with these rampaging urban youths. Perhaps I can help. Think of their aberrant behavior as the alley version of the Wall Street bum rush and rip-off.

First there were flash mobs of bankers and mortgage lenders picking pockets, looting businesses, taking over homes and torching jobs. Now come the young marauders — using a crude version of the same tactics, striking out in anger over the theft of their futures. Outraged that some would even blame them for the loss of their economic prospects.

At a recent town hall meeting on jobs, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray heard one youngster after another complain about the lack of employment opportunities in the city. One of them handed him 10 pages of signatures she’d collected from youths in her neighborhood who were looking for jobs.  An impressive show of civic-mindedness, to which Gray responded:

“The people who didn’t get jobs, I’m inclined to believe it’s their fault,” he said. “They didn’t do anything to help themselves.”

You don’t have to approve of flash mobs to understand how one might erupt on the spot.

In Philadelphia this past weekend, Mayor Michael A. Nutter made an even nuttier remark in the aftermath of a downtown flash mob attack.

“If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you?” Nutter lectured. “They don’t hire you because you look like you’re crazy.”

In the United States, the unemployment rate among black teenagers is 39.2 percent, compared with 23 percent for white teenagers. These numbers aren’t the result of black youngsters not combing their hair. Or not doing anything to help themselves. It’s the result of politicians reneging on promises to come up with policies and strategies for creating jobs and job-training programs.

According to a 2009 report by the District’s Healthy Families, Thriving Communities Collaborative Council, more than 100 gangs and neighborhood “crews” operate in the city — the heart of a flash mob — and the use of semiautomatic weapons is on the rise.

“Over the past 15 years, numerous plans, reports and proposals addressing youth violence prevention in the District have been prepared by both public and private agencies,” the report said. Providing job opportunities has always been strongly recommended. “Unfortunately, of those recommendations funded and implemented, most have been short lived due to budgetary constraints or diminished political support.”

The Washington Post noted Tuesday that former London mayor Ken Livingstone believed the unrest in that city was the result of pent-up resentment “over the weak economy, high unemployment rates and historically deep budget cuts that are decreasing government funding for poor communities and grass-roots charities.”

Livingstone got it. Hopefully more politicians in this country will, too. In London, the flash point for the unrest was a police shooting of a black man. We need not wait for that to happen here before taking preventive action.

It should be noted that London was one of the first cities to use the “Mosquito,” a device that emits a high-pitched sound aimed at irritating youthful ears and discouraging them from congregating in certain public places.

About 3,500 were deployed. Clearly, somebody got irritated. And now the city is in flames.

Another city where the Mosquito was deployed, albeit for a much shorter time: the District. But it should be clear by now that harassing and insulting youngsters only makes the problem worse.

Feeling disrespected and often outright ignored, many of them are threatening to destroy what they can’t have. And why not? The strategy worked so well for tea party anarchists that even President Obama started paying attention.

This morning I woke up in a curfew;

O God, I was a prisoner, too — yeah!

Could not recognize the faces standing over me;

They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality.

..... From Bob Marley’s “Burnin’ and Lootin’ ”

A Real Nice Guy

Turns out State Sen. Kris Jordan won’t be facing criminal charges. And just who is Kris Jordan, you ask? He's a Republican state senator in Ohio. He hates taxes, loves the NRA, and, oh yeah, seems to have a little drinking-and-getting-violent-with-his-wife problem.

Sen. Jordan, a Republican from Powell, told deputies that he and his wife had argued over his not cleaning their condo. Cruiser dashboard camera recordings released yesterday detail the deputies’ conversations with the Jordans.

“She got a little upset,” Sen. Jordan told a deputy on the recording. “Girls do that.”

The 34-year-old senator went on to say the incident was “90 percent emotion.”

“I threw some things on the ground, but I didn’t hit her or anything,” he said. “So she’s all worked up about who knows.”

Oh, those gosh darned girls, getting all emotional, the way they do. No wonder the esteemed state senator from Powell has to drink and get violent sometimes.

[His wife] also was recorded as saying violent incidents with her husband began about two years ago, sometimes after he had been drinking. She said her husband had been drinking that night but not to excess.

“This is not new,” Mrs. Jordan, 31, said. “He’s done this numerous times, and I just got sick of it and I just had to call.”

Imagine, a wife getting sick of her husband's drunken violence and finally calling the cops on him. The way girls do. But hey, at least he didn't hit her this time. Quick, someone give this guy a medal!

After all, according to his own press releases, he is a "proven advocate for family values." By which he means, apparently, that he's great at knocking back a few and then knocking around his wife. Because, you know, hypocritical Republican "family values" advocates do that.

.

Role Models

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Did Newsweek choose Michele Bachmann cover photo to make her ‘look crazy’?

A month after editor-in-chief Tina Brown Photoshopped the late Princess Diana walking alongside Kate Middleton onto the cover of Newsweek, sparking outrage among fans, Brown is drawing the ire of the tea party for selecting a photo of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) for Newsweek's cover that makes the 2012 Republican hopeful look, well, crazy.

The photo of Bachmann, shot in Washington on Aug. 1 by photographer Chris Buck, accompanies a cover story by Lois Romano entitled "The Queen of Rage." (Newsweek tweeted the cover image late Sunday with the #QueenOfRage hashtag.)

Reached via e-mail, Alice Stewart, Bachmann's press secretary, declined to comment. "We are focused on meeting with the people of Iowa in advance of the Straw Poll," she wrote in an email to The Cutline. And Bachmann brushed off a question about the cover from a voter in Iowa.

Conservative media pundits, though, were more than happy to respond.

"Under the editorial control of Tina Brown, the rice paper magazine barely struggles against its bias towards conservative women to view them with anything other than contempt," Dana Loesch wrote on Andrew Breitbart's BigJournalism.com.

It's not the first time that Newsweek has drawn the ire of conservatives--and women--over a candidate's cover photo. In 2008, Newsweek published an extreme close-up of Sarah Palin on its cover, sparking criticism.

"Memo to conservative women," Ed Morrissey wrote on HotAir.com. "When approached by Newsweek or Time for a cover story, always bring your own photographer."

In 2009, Newsweek published an old photo of Palin in running shorts--alongside the coverline "How do you solve a problem like Sarah Palin?"--prompting more outrage among conservatives. (Palin herself denounced the selection of the photo--from a Runner's World shoot--in a note to her Facebook fans: "The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now.")

But critics charge that the newsweekly is using more than just its cover image to editorialize about Bachmann and the basis of her popular appeal. An interior image--featuring Bachmann at a campaign stop and also taken by Buck--was shot from an angle that shows the conservative candidate with devil horn.

"Newsweek needs to be ashamed for propagating one of the typical female stereotypes used to denigrate women," a commenter on Newsweek.com wrote. "If you don't like Bachmann's positions, say so. But to slot her in the typical witch, bitch, nut, or slut memes hurts all women!"

A spokesman for Newsweek declined to comment on the controversy.

Brown defended her decision to Photoshop the image of the late Princess Diana onto the July 4 cover. "We wanted to bring the memory of Diana alive in a vivid image that transcends time," Brown said then in a statement to The Cutline, "and reflected my piece." Newsweek's newsstand sales are up roughly 30 percent since its redesign under Brown debuted in March.

The Newsweek Bachmann cover controversy also recalls a 2008 incident in which The Atlantic apologized to Arizona senator and presidential hopeful John McCain for hiring a freelance photographer--Jill Greenberg--who used a strobe light to create shadows on his face during a cover shoot. "He had no idea he was being lit from below," Greenberg told Photo District News after The Atlantic issue was published.

Greenberg created her own Photoshopped images from the McCain shoot for her personal website, including one of an ape defecating on McCain's head.

"She has, in fact, disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images of John McCain she has created for her Web site," the Atlantic wrote in an editor's note. "Obviously, we will not work with her again."

Blogger's Note:  I've never been a fan of Newsweek but I'm starting my subscription now.

Guess Who...

36 have been accused of spousal abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

19 have been accused of writing bad checks

117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3 have done time for assault

71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 currently are defendants in lawsuits,

84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year and

1 can't tell a townhouse from a church - at least that's what he told the District of Columbia government when they asked him to pay property taxes.

Can you guess which organization this is?

Is it the NBA, the NFL?

 Neither, it's the 535 members of the

United States Congress

The same group of Idiots that crank out

hundreds of new laws each year

designed to keep the rest of us in line.

Honor All the Heroes

Western press largely overlooks heroism of lesbian couple in Norway massacre

By Laura Rozen | The Envoy – 21 hrs ago

As Norway continues to grapple with the attacks by a home-grown extremist that killed 77 people last month, one couple, who moved to help young people fleeing from gunman Anders Breivik, is getting a bit of belated recognition.

Hege Dalen and her wife, Toril Hansen, were eating dinner on July 22nd on the other shore from Utoya island when they heard screaming, the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sannomat reported. After bombing government buildings in Oslo, Breivik had come to the island dressed as a policeman and went on to shoot more than 100 young people attending a Labour party camp there.

"We were eating," Dalen told the newspaper. "Then shooting and then the awful screaming. We saw how the young people ran in panic into the lake."

The couple took off in their boat for the island, picking up shocked victims from the water and transporting them to the mainland. They made four runs in all, helping rescue some 40 of Breivik's victims, the paper reported.

"Between runs they saw that the bullets had hit the right side of the boat," the paper wrote.

Some lesbian-gay news sites and blogs have picked up the account in recent days, noting the same-sex married heroes of the story haven't gotten much attention in the Western press.

..

LaHood, Rockefeller: Reauthorization Failure Affects More Than Just FAA Employees

By Althea Fung August 2, 2011 | National Journal

With the debt deal almost shored up, Congress has dashed off to enjoy the summer sun. But what about the FAA?

For more than 10 days now, the Federal Aviation Administration has been limited in its ability to control air traffic after both chambers of Congress failed to agree on an extension of funding for the reauthorization bill that expired in 2007 and has been temporarily extended 20 times since.

Without the reauthorization, the FAA has put about 4,000 employees on unpaid leave and is unable to collect taxes on airline tickets. Analysts estimate the government is losing $200 million a week in airline revenue because of the shutdown, according to Consumer Reports.

In separate opinion pieces published on Tuesday morning, both Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., wrote that the failure to reauthorize the agency is a disservice not only to FAA employees but to small businesses and to Americans as a whole.

Without the reauthorization, runways won’t get repaved, rehabilitation and extension projects are on hold, and the upgrade to satellite-based airspace management system is stalled, LaHood wrote in The Hill.

And the effects of the shutdown won’t just hurt the FAA employees, LaHood argued; it will affect 1 in 5 construction workers looking for work.

“The ripple effects are enormous. With workers barred from job sites, middle-class households won’t receive paychecks while their rent, mortgage or back-to-school bills pile up,” LaHood wrote. “Contractors will stop buying supplies. Employees will delay necessary purchases and repairs. Small-business owners will buy fewer goods for their restaurants and stores.”

The shutdown also hurts rural America, Rockefeller wrote in USA Today. The Essential Air Services program, which provides subsidies to major air carriers for air service to rural areas -- and which Republicans are trying to kill -- is on hold with the failure to reauthorize, he said.

“The EAS program has long been a lifeblood of economic development in rural America. Eliminating EAS today would take airline travel away from more than 150 small communities,” Rockefeller wrote. "In my state of West Virginia and many others, hub airports are hours away for most communities, and many businesses won't consider locating in places that lack air service. EAS, which is less than 2% of our aviation budget, makes a difference."

The House went into recess on Monday night and is not expected to return until after the Labor Day weekend.